Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

Re: Profits from GPLed software? Hardly.

Author:Ken MacLeod
Posted:8/24/2000; 8:08:19 AM
Topic:Next survey: Are you an open source developer?
Msg #:20089 (In response to 20079)
Prev/Next:20088 / 20090

There appears to be no reason why a company couldn't do the same with Linux, so there's no point made there.

In more detail, everything Apple has added to the BSD portion of OS X is in Darwin and has been given back to the OS community (Linux's GPL wouldn't have required that either). Anyone can build a proprietery user interface on top of Linux, and a few have.

Brett's point appears to be that GPL's "poison pill", as he calls it, causes people to give back to the community even if they don't want to, and he builds this up to where he says that a Linux distribution is doomed to fail because of it. By implication, a *BSD distribution won't fail because it has no such "poison pill" license, even if the distributor chooses to give back all enhancements to the community.

The logic fails there and Mac OS X doesn't support that claim either.

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